Jocko Willink Weighs In on Defunding the Police | Joe Rogan

This is, a lot of it is this, right? So people are feeling a certain way and they're not, they're not feeling, like this girl that wrote All Lives Matter. Do you think that was her clandestine way of showing that she's all about white pride? You know what I mean? No. She was thinking, hey, everyone matters. She's probably having some nice thoughts, you know? But then all of a sudden, no, this chick is evil, right, for doing this. I think there's a lot of that. I think there's a lot of people that, I think most people are pretty sane. I think most people are pretty reasonable. I think, you know, anybody looking at the George Floyd case is like, yeah, that's completely wrong. That's disgusting. It's horrible, taintous to watch. I haven't heard anyone say anything other than that. So how are we just getting so completely divided on this whole thing and start attacking people, start attacking each other just over absolutely everything? That's a good point because this is literally a case where no one is saying there's nothing wrong with what that cop did. No one. No one. Zero people. Zero people. But yet everybody's still at each other's throats. Zero people have stuck up for that guy in any way, shape, or form. Even law enforcement. No law enforcement people saying, you've got to understand, this is how you control a man. You've got to lean on his neck for about eight minutes, 40, 45 seconds, 46 seconds. No one's saying that. You know what they're saying? They're saying, defund the police. They're saying no more choke holds, right? Which is crazy. If you want to get someone to be under control and you can't choke them, you know what you have to do? You have to hit them in the head with a baton seven times and you've got to risk giving them brain damage, permanently injuring them. If people know what they're doing, I mean, obviously if people know what they're doing, we'll put a choke hold. They'll wake up, they'll be cuffed. We're all good. Yeah, obviously. But, you know, it's the people that are doing it wrong is the problem. The people that shouldn't be doing it in the first place, it's untrained people. But if you're a cop and you're going to fight for your life and you can't use choke holds, that's fucking crazy. It's insane. You're going to get shot and killed or somebody else is going to get shot and killed, someone's going to take your gun. Yeah. The idea of defund the police, and I understand the premise, okay? And this is once again where many people that say defund the police, they don't mean, hey, just get rid of police. Of course, there's a fraction of people that are saying defund the police means we don't want any more police anymore. There's a portion of people saying that. There's some people that are saying, well, if we defund the police, we can relocate some of that money and we can do, you know, better schools and we can put money into the infrastructure inside these neighborhoods. But here's the problem. You know what the police need more than anything else? They need money for training. And the way the police departments are set up, they do the most ridiculously minuscule amount of training for what their job is. So as you know, I was in the SEAL teams, we would train for 18 months, 18 months, we were trained to go on a six month appointment. Cops, they train, they get like two hours or four hours of combatives training a year, a year. That's complete insanity. It's complete insanity. The thing I've been saying is cops should train one fifth of the time. One fifth of the time you should be training, whether it's two hours a day, four times a week or whether it's one day a week where you're going to go and you're going to go through scenarios. You're going to do combatives. You're going to work with simunition. You're going to do de-escalation drills because it's really hard. I mean, being a cop is, I think is the hardest job in the world. And by the way, they're not going to have to worry about defunding the police because no one's going to want to be a cop anymore. Who is going to be fired up to be a cop right now? Who's going to think, you know what? When I grow up, I want to be hated by entire, you know, by a massive portion of the country. I want to be viewed as someone that kills innocent people. The recruiting in cop for police is going to go down so hard. It's going to be ridiculous. It's going to be ridiculous. And then who are you getting there? You're going to get people that are worst level people, worst level humans are going to show up to be cops. So the training piece, though, they should do very scenario driven training, right? Where you come into a room and this isn't like super expensive stuff either. You come into a room, there's a person there, they appear to be compliant. You ask you learn how to talk to him. You very quickly learn that instead of yelling them out of the out of the gate, you say, hey, man, what's going on? Hey, what's your name? You know what's going on? We got a call here. Is everything OK? You immediately deescalate. Then you learn what to do when they're not when they don't respond the way you want them to respond. You learn what to do when they start to do something drastic. What's the best thing for you? And you play through these scenarios. It's just like jujitsu in the fact that what makes jujitsu good? What makes jujitsu good is we can go hard against each other over and over again and not really get hurt, not really get killed. So you get really good at it. That's what you need to do in training for police. You need to go through these tough scenarios over and over again because you do get better at it. You do get better at it. You become you learn how to mentally detach and not get emotional and realize that there's other things that are happening. When you see the George Floyd case, a couple of the other cops, two, I think two of the other guys were complete rookies, right? They had been on the force for a very short period of time. No one in that group of four, obviously you got the killer himself. He's actually conducting the act. But all the other guys are not paying attention. They're all emotional themselves. Hey, stay back. And they're probably watching him saying, what's why isn't that guy moving? And they're just caught up in it. Whereas if someone would have showed up on the scene or one of those guys had been through some good training in their life, they would have said, what's happening here? Hold on. My partner over there has been on this guy for two minutes. He's not moving anymore. I'm going to walk over and say, hey, man, let me take over. I got this. Go over there decompress. This takes training. You have to train people. And I got I saw this over and over again in the SEAL teams. I mean, guys, you get a young kid that's coming through training for the first time and they go into a room and they're getting shot with simunition bullets or there's someone yelling and screaming or that we'd put we'd put Arabic women coming walking out of rooms. We'd have people get blown up with wounds. We would do this to them over and over again. So they realize, OK, I just got to relax. I got to take a step back. I got to detach from this situation so I can process what's happening and I can make a good decision because as I said earlier, no one is making a good decision when they're panicked, when they're freaked out, when they're scared. As a jujitsu guy, when someone puts hands on you, you're not actually scared, right? You're like, oh, OK, I know what to do here. If you don't know jujitsu, if you've never had someone grab you before or you haven't had someone grab you in 17 months or 14 months, no one's laid hands on you because you got a badge and a gun. So people when you tell them to do something, 95 percent of the time they go, OK, I don't want to get in trouble. But then somebody grabs you. You're instantly, your emotions are spiked, your adrenaline spiked. And the only way to overcome that is through consistent training that happens on a regular basis. You can't just train somebody one time. It's like ring rust. You can't just train somebody one time and, oh, now I don't need to train anymore. No, you need to do continuous training. So that fact right there, if we want to help the police through these situations, we need to invest more money into them. We need to get them better training. We need to pull them out of the field to train and pull them out of the field to decompress because you ever done a ride along? No. Like you, whether you're doing a ride along, whether you're going into any situation where you're thinking you could be killed and even if it's just a remote chance, but you're doing that all the time, all the time. And you're hearing, you're seeing on the news, you're, oh, you hear this. Oh, your buddy got shot. Your buddy got whatever. This other guy got, you know, take his gun taken away. Like that stuff happens. That stuff happens. People get killed. I mean, there's been, I think there's been 31 cops killed this year. 31 cops killed this year. And a lot of those, that's not including, you know, like a car accident or COVID. There's been a bunch died of COVID, but just people that have been engaged with bad guys and they got killed. So you're a cop. When another cop gets killed, you're thinking that could be you. So that's your mindset and that mindset builds and that mindset builds and you're working 10 hour days and you're working 12 hour days and there's no training and there's no breaks. Where do you end up? Right? Where do you end up? You end up being a little bit paranoid. You end up being a little bit angry. What happens when you get in a fight with your wife? You know, it's like all these things you add them together. It's a freaking hard job. And from a, from a, like an entire systemic way of training and recruiting and, and keeping police ready to do their job, whatever that job entails, because let's face it, most of the time that job entails, well, I guess most of the time it entails, hey, I'm going to go have a bad, I'm about to go have a bad relationship with another human being. That's what's about to happen, right? Whether I'm pulling you over, whether I'm, I've been called to your house because you were yelling and screaming and people heard your wife screaming or whatever. That's what's happening. I'm showing up in a bad relationship. You don't like me and I already don't like you. That's where we start. That's where we start. So we got to train people for that. We also got to train them for all the times that they go into help people, save people. They're the first people on the scene at car accidents. People are bleeding out. We got to train them for that. And then they have to also be trained for, hey, this is a bad guy. That's going to, this is the guy that you just talked about at a gas station with a weapon that wants to kill a bunch of people. You got to be prepared for that whole spectrum as a police officer. And yet we send them to a three month long police academy and then we send them out in the street and that's what they do day in, day out, day in, day out. It seems to me that they need to be vetted too much better than they are now. Just like the seals. Like you can't get through buds unless you are a superior human being. You have to be able to tolerate a bunch of shit that most people are going to fall apart during. And this is, this seems to me, this is a great way to weed out people that just don't have it. Yeah. There's, well, one thing that's interesting just from a physical perspective, most police departments don't even have a minimum physical requirement to continue to be on the force. You have to be at a certain level to graduate from the academies, but oftentimes there's no standard beyond that. Yeah. I've seen cops before that we're like, this is hilarious. Like what is going to stop someone from closing the distance on you? Like you, you ain't getting into that gun. But the mental aspect is stuff that you can get better at. You can get better at it, but you only get better at it through training and you only get really comfortable through training a lot. And yet we put these people in these horrible positions over and over and over again. And we don't give them the proper training. And now there's these politicians that because of the current social climate, they're encouraged to want to defund the police. That's a great way for them to get brownie points from their constituents. The people want the police to fund it, which is, it's the dumbest idea I've ever heard of my life. It's so crazy that this is actually gaining steam to the point where in Minneapolis, because they're trying to quiet down the mob. They've actually gone ahead and done it. What the fuck is Minneapolis going to look like in a year from now? It's going to look like Mad Max. I mean, it's going to be crazy. It's going to be, it's going to be crazy. It's going to be, uh, you know, criminals will go there to commit crimes if there's no, if there's no police there. Are you crazy? By the way, this Jaco energy drink is the shit. It's very legit. Right. Yeah. I just don't understand where they think this game ends. I don't think they've planned it out. They're not playing chess. The other, the other thing that you, you know, you're talking about this Brownie points for the politicians and, and there's Brownie points and there's people trying to create sides. It's my side versus your side. And that's a completely political thing. Right. And all that does is increase the divide between the police and the civilians. And this reminds me a lot of, of a counterinsurgency, right? So counterinsurgency, the insurgents are, you know, bad guys inside of a country. The country's not bad. There's some bad guys in a country. So what you have to do is you actually have to go out and build relationships with the good people inside that country so that the good people inside that country can help you get rid of the bad people. What happens if you go out and this, so this is Ramadi Iraq. This is my last deployment to Iraq. There's a bunch of just totally normal, good people, Iraqi people that are living in the city of Ramadi. What do they want to do? You know what they want to do? They want to send their kids to school. They want to run their little market. They want to do whatever that whatever is that they do. That's what they want to do. They have the same goal as a normal family. They're just a normal bunch of people. And inside that group of people, there's a bunch of bad people. And these are insurgents. Some of them are foreign fighters. Some of them are foreign regime elements from Saddam, but they're bad and they want to create chaos and mayhem. So Americans, we go in there. If we go in there super heavy handed and while I go to capture or kill one bad guy, I kill or maim a couple of those normal civilians. What happens? Well, a couple of those normal civilians family go, wait, you guys aren't good. You guys are bad. You guys just killed my brother and he didn't do anything wrong. And then we do it again and then we do it again and then we do it again. And each time that we do this, we're we're creating more animosity from the local populace who by the way, like I said, they're just not good, normal people. So what we had to do is really focus on going out and building relationships with the local populace. How do we do that? One of the things this this happened after I left, but you remember the surge that took place and they sent a bunch more troops over there. Part of the reason that they sent that surge and part of the reason that that was allowed to happen was because the Battle of Ramadi where I fought went very well. And since it went well, people said, well, maybe maybe we can pull this off. So they sent more troops. And one of the directives that General Petraeus gave is he said there can be no more drive by counterinsurgency. And what he meant that by that was when you go to a neighborhood, you can't just drive through the neighborhood in your Humvee, in your bulletproof Humvee with your windows up drive through show of force and then leave. That doesn't work. What you have to do is stop your vehicles. You have to get out. You have to talk to the local populace. You have to ask them what's going on. You have to ask them if they need anything. You have to build relationships with the local populace, the good local populace that just wants those insurgents out of there. And that's what I don't see happening. And the more we increase this divide between the police and the civilians, the worse that's going to get. And so the police have to start doing a better job of outreach of, hey, you know, I asked you if you did a ride along. They should be offering ride alongs all the time to the local kids, 17 year old kids, 15 year old kids. Hey, come and see what my job is like. Come and help me out. 15 year old kid, he knows who the bad actors are. He knows who the good kids are. You know, bring that kid along on a ride along. Let him see what it looks like from your angle. Get out, meet the parents, meet the families. That's where we're failing to build relationships between the police and the civilians. And that causes that that causes these problems. I think you're 100 percent correct, but I don't hear anybody repeating what you're saying. That's what's terrifying to me. I think everything you're saying is logical. It makes sense. It comes from experience. I don't hear anybody saying this. Yeah. And I well, I think maybe it's because people just don't recognize what's happening because they're too in it, right? They're too in it. They're wrapped up in it. And and that's another part. You know, I talked about recruiting. Who you recruiting? Recruit those kids. Recruit those kids. But you have to build a relationship with them before you can add before anyone's going to go into the police. And look, I think it's the I think it's the L.A. police department. If you look at the L.A. police department compared to the racial makeup of L.A., they're pretty equivalent and they're pretty equivalent on purpose. They do that for a reason. So you got to get that. You got to continue to build that those relationships so that we talk to one another. You know, we actually communicate with each other because any time I'm allowed to sit over here in my area and you're sitting over there in your area, we're building animosity. We build that kind of animosity between each other. And now the littlest thing, the littlest thing. I mean, there was a woman that was killed in Minneapolis like two, three years ago. Do you remember this one? Yes. Female. A yoga instructor called the police. The police called the police to report a disturbance. Police showed up and there's no video, no footage. She gets killed by the cops. She gets killed by the cops. It's insane that these things happen. But we also have to remember what, like I said, what is a police officer thinking about and what kind of training and we give them and what kind of psychological screening to your point, what kind of strike. And it's not just a one time psychological screen screening because guess what? People get burnt out and it happens at different times to different people. You take 35 guys in combat. I've got some guys at the end of a six month deployment there. You know what they're telling me? Can I stay longer? I'm doing fine. You get one month into that deployment and you've got other guys that are saying, hey, do you need anyone to head home early? Right? That happens. So you think in a police force of a thousand people or whatever size your police force is, you're going to have some people that are steady, mentally stable. They can deal with it. They can go, they can be in an officer involved shooting today and tomorrow they can go back to their job and be perfectly fine. There's other people, they can never work again after they're in an officer involved shooting. What kind of investment are we making into this psychological health of police? And look, I hope it doesn't sound like I'm sitting here just putting it all on the police because everyone is playing a role in this. And one of the things that you need to look at as well is how to get arrested, right? There should be a public service course on how you should get arrested. This is what you should do. If the cops are pulling you over, if the cops ask you, if the cops approach you about something, here's what you should think. One of the things you should think is, okay, this cop may not be bad. This cop may be looking out for my welfare right now. That's a great, hopeful thought. The other thing that you have to think is kind of worst case scenario. This cop might be agitated. This cop might be looking for somebody that fits my description. This cop might have just been in a fight with his wife. He might've just lost a partner. There's a million bad things. Use that scenario in your head. Use that scenario in your head to contemplate how you're going to interact with a police officer, which is, you know what they're looking at? They're looking at your hands. You know why? Because that's where the threat comes from. The threat comes from your hands. So when you're making quick movement with your hands, don't do that. Listen to what they say. Move slowly when you move. This should be public service. The police should be putting out, hey, if you interact with the police, we hate to have to say this, but since our police sometimes are in bad situations, here's some things we recommend and we highly suggest and we beg. We beg that you do this. We beg, because what happens to these cops when they kill somebody? What happens to them? Their lives are totally destroyed. Well, that was the thing about that guy in Minneapolis. He'd already killed people. He'd already been involved and I think it's at least two shootings and he had more than a dozen complaints against him. Yeah. Not good. Not good. It's obvious by the end, by the end result, that's the type of guy he was. It's pretty obvious, but the fact that he was able to do that to a man, the guy's literally calling out to his dead mother. You know? I mean, the type of man that can stay on someone's neck while they're doing that, when all that guy did was have a counterfeit $20 bill, that's it. This is where when you talk about psychological screening, and that's why I'm saying it. It has to be constant, because people change, right? And red flags. I mean, like you said, hindsight's 20-20. We're looking at this case now. We're going, who the hell lets this guy continue to police? And by the way, interestingly enough, if you talk to internal affairs at police departments, the vast majority of the complaints that they get about police are from police. So they report each other. That's a little known fact. Most of the reports don't come from the civilians out there saying, hey, this happened or that happened. Most of the time, it's cops saying, hey, this guy was out of line here. Well, that's a good sign. It doesn't look rosy. When I'm looking at the future, I don't see a way during this climate. What scares me the most is I don't see a way if we don't talk to each other. That's where there's no solution. Because look, for every 10 viral video that you see of a cop hitting somebody with a baton or a riot or throwing something through a window, for every 10 of those viral videos, there's another viral video that has the guy with the free hugs t-shirt on that's out talking to the cops and saying, hey, I get it. And they're communicating with each other and talking. And when you communicate with people, it's just like a hostage rescue, basic technique. You want to humanize. You want to humanize instead of dehumanize. And right now, we're just dehumanizing each other completely. And that's what scares me more than anything else, is if we can't talk to each other. Because look, you take the most hardened soldier in war, some badass soldier that's done four deployments, six deployments, whatever, and you put him into a room with a kid and a mom, an Iraqi kid and a mom or an Afghan kid and a mom. And you put him in that room and say, hey, sit here for 15 minutes and find out what they're about. Here's an interpreter. That guy's going to come out of there going, yeah, I get where they're coming from. And same thing, vice versa. You take a hardened jihadist and you say, hey, talk to this guy over here about what he's trying to do inside your country. Just talk to him. When you open up the communications and are you going to get some extremists on both ends? Yes, you will. Maybe I shouldn't have said the most hardened soldier and the most hardened, because you know what the most hardened soldier becomes a killer, becomes a killer. That happens. It happens all the time. You know, I shouldn't say it happens all the time. It happens from time to time. That's how you get the Miele massacre. It happens. The most hardened jihadist, they're not going to change their mind. They're not going to come to any rose-colored view of America. But barring those total extremes, you've got people. You've got other human beings. And if you can get them to talk to each other, they can find consensus. They can find common ground. But if they're not talking to each other, then we don't move it, make any progress. And what, to your whole kind of point about what's happening right now, there's less and less communication between people, open communication. Because if you talk to someone and they say, the cops did this, this, and this, and you say, oh, okay, explain to me what happened. Tell me what went down. And then you say, hey, let me tell you what it's like for a cop, being a cop, when he sees that, when he sees something going on. You know how many domestic violence cases happened, and the person shows up, and they're getting assaulted by both parties? So maybe that's what this cop was thinking when he showed up and saw your mom in this situation and did this to your dad. This is real conversations, but we don't have them. And not only we don't have them, it seems like there's forces that are actively trying to prevent us from talking to each other, from sitting down at a table and saying, hey, man, tell me what's going on. What forces? Who wants the country to be divided? It's the people that you're talking about earlier that how do they score points? How do I score points with this group? How do I score points with the other group? It's by making everything as divisive as possible. It's horrible to watch, man. It's sickening to watch. I was reading a whole series of tweets where there's a journalist that was talking about how cops shooting black men is a real problem, but another real problem that's not being discussed by this Black Lives Matter group is black on black crime. And how do we stop all the murders that are taking place in Chicago? This is something that should be discussed. And this guy was getting attacked. And another journalist was literally tweeting at him saying, you have been told not to discuss this. But yet he ignores these commands that he should not discuss. It's a very real issue, as if somehow or another bringing up another issue that is also a problem diminishes the original issue of this guy getting killed by cops, which of course it doesn't. Yeah. But the idea is that there's problems. There's real problems. It's not just the cops killing these people. Look, the cop killed this guy in Minneapolis. He didn't do anything in Seattle. How the fuck did that shit happen in Seattle? Well, it happened in Seattle because of this reactionary world where one person does something somewhere. It gets through social media. It gets through the mainstream media. It becomes this huge inflammatory subject. And then the next thing you know, windows are getting smashed. Things are getting lit on fire. Cars are getting turned over. Blocks are getting taken. And that's where we find ourselves. I think it was May 29th. There was a cop killed, I want to say in Texas, and he was killed when they rolled into a scene. They got a call, hey, suspicious person running through the neighborhood. They roll up on the scene. They start a couple, a few cops are now searching for this guy and they see a building with an open door. They go, okay, let's, maybe he's in there. Let's go clear this building with an open door. They go in this building with an open door. Shots fired. One of the cops killed one of the other cops. So just friendly fire, death. That right there, if you take that and you just extrapolate that over how hard it is to be a police officer, that you can be going into a building and you shoot one of your friends because you think they're bad. That is a real problem. That's how hard this job is. My point is that's how hard this job is, but we have to do a better job of explaining that. We have to do a better job of explaining how hard this job is. As far as the, hey, don't talk about black on black violence, I was talking with my podcast bro, Echo Charles, who's a black guy. We were talking about that and I said, you know, I think it might have a little bit to do with this. If you're watching UFC and there's two guys that are fighting and the round ends, just at the end of the round, all of a sudden the referee comes in and punches one of the, just Muay Thai kicks a guy in the head and knocks him out. Everyone would be completely utterly outraged about this, right? Because that guy wasn't in the game. What's that guy doing? I think there's a little bit of that. The referee is supposed to not do that. When you see a cop, the thought is, hey, that guy's viewed as a referee. That guy's not supposed to be doing this. I think that is kind of where some of that outrage comes from because this is a cop. This isn't supposed to be happening here. This guy is not supposed to be killing people and he did. It's also that the cop is just a person who has this extraordinary power and extraordinary responsibility too. What's terrifying to me is that when I'm looking at this idea to defund the police and then I'm thinking, what do these neighborhoods look like if you wind up doing that? How do you get back out of that? What do you do, refund the police? Do you ramp it up and do it better next time? This is a long process. You're looking at a lot of trial and error here over perhaps multiple years before they figure out what they fucked up. Yeah. I know there's some city. I think it's in New Jersey. That. That completely dismantled their police, but then they rebuilt a new police department. I actually get that. You could get a department that was so completely and utterly corrupt that you said, you know what? We're getting rid of all of them. Did you ever see cocaine cowboys? No. Great documentary. But one of the things it talks about is the corruption during the cocaine era of the 80s where the entire graduating police force, the entire from the police academy, the entire graduating year, everyone was either murdered or went to jail for corruption. Everyone, the entire graduating class. That's how bad it was. Yeah. So if you have that kind of problem, I get it. You might want to dismantle that police force. You know what happens in the SEAL team sometimes. Sometimes there's a platoon that's so bad that they just dismantled the whole platoon. How often does that happen? Very rarely, but it does happen. Really? Yeah. What causes something like that? The problem is bad leadership. It's always bad leadership because you can take a bunch of knuckleheads and you give them a good leader and they'll do fine. So it always comes down to the leadership. So sometimes they'll replace a leader. And usually when they replace a leader, you'll watch the platoon will turn around almost instantly because someone steps in and says, all right, here's what we're doing. Here's how we're doing it. And they make that change. But sometimes you have just like a bad platoon and they say, you know what? You guys are done.